BEIJING: China has made progress in promoting green development of agriculture since the beginning of this year, as the country is acting on the vision of green development.
According to a report by China Central Television (CCTV), since the start of this year, China has been actively pursuing the national initiative for black soil protection. As part of this initiative, the country has implemented a system of fallowing and crop rotation practices, which have led to a gradual improvement in the quality of cultivated land.
China has made significant strides in improving its agricultural land and practices. So far, the country has cultivated 66.67 million hectares of high-quality farmland. Simultaneously, China has been actively developing water-efficient agriculture to reduce water consumption. These efforts have resulted in 39.4 million hectares of farmland being covered by water-saving irrigation systems, raising the overall irrigation efficiency to 0.572.
China has also worked on reducing the application
of chemical fertilizers and pesticides for higher efficiency. Now the rate of livestock and poultry manure use, the rate of straw utilization and the disposal rate of agricultural films have surpassed 78 percent, 88 percent, and 80 percent respectively.
China has seen more aquatic life since the country imposed a fishing ban on the Yangtze River, with the fish species in the key waters of the Yangtze River Basin reaching 193, 25 more compared with the 2018-level. The index of biological integrity (IBI) of the main stream of the Yangtze River, the Poyang Lake in east China, and the Dongting Lake in central China climbed by two grades.
China has more than 68,000 green and organic agricultural products, and the proportion of good agricultural products has stayed at above 97.4 percent in national routine inspection in the past five years.
China has also made steady progress in processing agricultural products and by-products, as the country has worked to coordinate agricultural product primary processing, deep
processing, and utilization of by-products.
China has also made progress in reducing the processing loss, with the grain loss in processing standing at 3.7 percent, about one percentage point lower from 2015. The average annual grain loss is more than five billion kilograms.
China has developed a number of agricultural service providers and a slew of technical modes since the country started to pilot the green farming three years ago.
The central government allocated 7.402 billion yuan (1.026 billion U.S. dollars) to promote green farming in 299 counties in major animal husbandry provinces, grain and vegetable producing areas, and key ecological protection areas.
Now, China has developed 10 methods to use manure for farming, and these methods have been used on 4.09 million hectares of farmland.
At the same time, China has also developed 2,500 providers capable of turning manure into fertilizer for farming, serving 890,000 farming and husbandry entities.
“We’ve been promoting light, simple, and practical
methods to using manure for farming by crops and by regions. We’ve improved the mechanism for interest coordination between farms, service providers and crop growers, and enhanced the system of whole-process supervision over manure collection, disposal and utilization, so that manure can be used for farming in fields in the closest vicinity,” said Xue Yandong, chief of the fertilizer and water-saving division of the planting department of China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
Next, China will also work to strengthen the relevant mechanisms and make technological innovation to further promote green farming in the country.
Source: Emirates News Agency
